Scratched Into Being documents the small marks people leave behind when the city keeps trying to erase them. The project began by looking at scratches, carvings, tags, dents, and other tiny forms of evidence found in public space. Some of them are easy to dismiss as damage, but I was more interested in what they were asking for: proof that someone was here, someone touched this, someone pressed hard enough to leave a mark.
The work thinks about visibility, disappearance, and the quiet desperation of being undocumented by the official record. A city is full of systems that decide what gets preserved and what gets cleaned away. These marks exist outside that permission. They are not polished monuments. They are quick, imperfect, sometimes almost invisible attempts to stay present.
The physical book uses photography, essay, an acrylic cover, mixed vellum paper, and hand-sewn binding to hold those marks as an archive. The material choices keep the work unstable and layered. Images show through each other. Text sits between documentation and reflection. The book becomes a record of traces, but also a question about what makes something worth keeping.
The website extends that idea into an interactive space where drawing sits on top of archived images. Instead of only looking at evidence, the viewer can add to it, cover it, repeat it, or make another mark. The digital layer becomes a way of asking what participation means when the subject is already about being seen and erased.
Scratched Into Being is not really about vandalism. It is about the need to be witnessed. It is about evidence that does not wait to be approved. It is about not wanting to be forgotten, and the strange tenderness of marks that were never supposed to last.
